Refining the animation

We've animated the character's body and head, so now that has motor control.…We still haven't worked on the arms, so let's do that in this lesson.…So let's go ahead and take a look at the character, and just do a quick playback here.…And as you can see, he has control over his hips, and his torso, and his head, and…that allows him to twist his body, and look over his shoulder, as well as drop his…weight, but we still don't have animation on the arms, and those are kind of…still flopping around.…Now, before we actually animate the arms, let's understand what we're going to do with the arms.…

As the character is being pushed back and forth, one of the main things he wants…to do is maintain his balance.…So we want to go ahead and put the arms out a little bit to kind of steady the character.…So let's go to the first keyframe here, I'm going to go ahead and select my left…shoulder here, and let's go to Frame 8 here, and that's where we have that first…keyframe for the arm.…And let's make sure we have Auto Key turned on here, and I'm going to go ahead…

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Author

Released

4/12/2012

Character Animation Fundamentals in 3ds Max demonstrates the basic principles of character animation that help bring simple 3D characters to life. Starting with an overview of the character rig, author George Maestri provides guidelines for creating strong poses and explains how to animate from pose to pose in an organized fashion. The course also covers locomotion—animating realistic gestures, walks, and runs; explores the basics of facial expressions and dialogue; and culminates with an animated scene built entirely from scratch.

Topics include:

Posing digital characters

Creating stock poses

Understanding forces, character motion, and secondary motion

Keyframing initial poses

Animating weight shifts and pose-to-pose transitions

Animating walks and runs

Adding personality to a walk

Animating facial movement: blinks, head turns, and mouth movement

Animating an entire scene

Skill Level Intermediate

5h 56m

Duration

86,716

Views

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Q: Where can I download the Linktivity Presenter drawing tool?

A: Linktivity Presenter is no longer available since the recording of this course. An alternative on-screen drawing tool is VB Doodle, which works with most 3d rendering software. Download VB Doodle here.